Building Scalable
Robust Backends

Digital Reading · Subscriptions · Payments

• ▹Cut payments Sentry backlog 48% (202 to 105 issues) and event volume 42% (250k to 144k) through an AI-assisted weekly triage and 74 closed tickets.
• ▹Eliminated 229k Stripe webhook errors for 10.8k users and fixed checkout 500s for 2,537 by persisting each subscription's Stripe account and handling detached payment methods.
• ▹Closed a payments log-leak audit across 60+ files, redacting gateway credentials, tokens, and PII, and wrote a rotation runbook covering all 10 payment vendors.
• ▹Retired legacy payment code by deleting 6,000+ lines (Bango, Braintree Forward API, Fortumo, fraud scoring) and queued 7 unused tables (7M+ rows) for production drop.
• ▹Migrated 13k retired-carrier subscribers into standard dunning and cancellation using a dry-run-first admin command with dedupe and currency-mismatch rollback.
• ▹Moved payments alerting to Terraform: adopted 121 Datadog monitors through a batch-import script and repaired or deleted 9 dead monitors.
• ▹Stabilized Google Play Billing by closing 13 tickets and adding missed-renewal reconciliation, stuck-order tooling, and a v2 payload state resolver.
• ▹Automated weekly Sentry triage with Claude Code skills that classify issues, group root causes, and draft Jira tickets for approval, shared with the payments team.
• ▹Built an LLM wiki and a 21-tool MCP server that enforces its schema, capturing 85 incident investigations, 49 plans, and 33 post-deploy verifications.
• ▹Authored a Nix devenv and agent guidance for the monolith: AGENTS.md, 8 routed guides covering 17 code patterns, and a linter for the docs.

EdTech · K-12 Communications

• ▹Architected a distributed event-driven messaging platform serving 1M+ district users by integrating Ruby on Rails, Apache Kafka, and resilient background services.
• ▹Scaled SMS delivery throughput from 1,200/min to 20,000/min (16x boost) by implementing a Kafka pipeline with Karafka and optimized batch dispatch.
• ▹Modernized a critical legacy Rails monolith to Rails 7 with zero downtime, eliminating message bottlenecks by integrating Kafka event consumers.
• ▹Cut telecom onboarding latency by 90% (from days to hours) by automating A2P 10DLC registration and Twilio/Bandwidth profile provisioning via Rails.
• ▹Engineered an automated data ingestion pipeline syncing 500k+ district staff records daily across internal products using Nest.js and SFTP/CSV integrations.
• ▹Mentored a squad of 6 engineers across sprint cycles, establishing RFC design reviews and weekly 1:1 technical coaching.
• ▹Accelerated engineer onboarding and debugging by 50% by building a production-like Docker Compose environment simulating distributed services and Kafka brokers.
• ▹Elevated test coverage from 0% to 75% on legacy code and maintained 90%+ on new services through automated CI gates and pre-commit hooks.
• ▹Automated release workflows across 6 repositories using Conventional Commits, cutting weekly release overhead from 3 hours to zero manual intervention.

Nonprofit · Donations · Payments

• ▹Engineered a high-conversion, accessible donation widget using vanilla JavaScript and Web Components, reducing asset bundle size by 40% across mobile devices.
• ▹Optimized international payment processing by integrating Stripe and PayPal smart routing, reducing transaction failure rates by 15% across 30+ currencies.
• ▹Reduced CI suite execution time by 35% and eliminated intermittent test flakes by replacing Selenium with Cuprite for headless Chrome testing.

E-commerce · Marketplace

• ▹Reduced database read load by 60% and slashed p95 query latency to under 50ms by architecting Elasticsearch clusters for product search and catalog.
• ▹Established modular domain boundaries by architecting the company's first isolated Rails Engine, decoupling checkout logic and speeding up deploy cycles by 25%.
• ▹Eliminated 99% of order synchronization errors by building a resilient ETL ingestion pipeline handling high-volume external marketplace orders via Sidekiq.
• ▹Cut frontend asset build times by 70% in CI pipelines by executing migration from Webpacker to modern Rails Importmaps.
• ▹Accelerated GitLab CI feedback loops from 22 minutes to 8 minutes through test deduplication, database indexing, and parallel job orchestration.
• ▹Eliminated price race conditions for 50k+ daily concurrent shoppers by implementing real-time inventory broadcasts via ActionCable and Hotwire Turbo Streams.

Software Consultancy

• ▹Curacubby: Raised test suite coverage from 60% to 86% across billing systems, reducing production regression incidents by 40%.
• ▹Curacubby: Led migration of core application from Rails 4 to Rails 6, resolving security vulnerabilities and improving response times by 20%.
• ▹Curacubby: Halved CI pipeline runtimes by configuring parallel test execution, static analysis with RuboCop, and modular Rails Engines.
• ▹Kueski: Engineered a low-latency fraud-scoring microservice processing 10k+ daily loan applications with sub-100ms response times.
• ▹Kueski: Integrated risk evaluation APIs with core lending systems using strict OpenAPI contracts, cutting contract validation errors to zero.

Software Consultancy

• ▹Promoted from Junior to Senior Engineer within 3 years, leading 4 client backend implementations across fintech and logistics domains.
• ▹Architected Prepaid2Cash transaction backend and integrated Sift Science fraud detection, reducing fraudulent transactions by 30% while processing millions in card volume.
• ▹Migrated legacy infrastructure from Rackspace to AWS and upgraded Rails 3 to Rails 4 for Orbridge, achieving 99.9% uptime and automated backups.